Reporter's Notebook:
Stolen Children

 

I started my series of portraits about residential schools with a call to Dorothy Cook at Gabriel Dumont, an aboriginal housing complex in Scarborough. I told her I wanted to talk to someone who'd attended a residential school. Did she know anyone?

"Well, I'm thinking of someone," Dorothy told me. "Whether she'll want to talk to you is another question."

These are stories that many residential school survivors haven't even told their own children. Perhaps especially their own children. People who live through a generational trauma, from the Holocaust to residential schools to apartheid, sometimes prefer silence.

A born storyteller

Sometimes it's easier to tell the stories to a stranger. Or maybe it was simply time to talk. In any case, Edna Pruitt agreed to meet me. At first, the stories didn't come easily. Edna was sometimes maudlin, hinting at disturbing memories and abruptly changing the subject. No wonder. They were grim stories. As a child, Edna was repeatedly forced to have sex with her father. When she became pregnant at 13, authorities jailed her father, and sent Edna away from her siblings to a residential school in Toronto.

But Edna is a born storyteller, and on my next visit, the details of residential school came vividly to life. At the residential school in Toronto, attended by both native and non-native children, Edna always sat at the back of the dining hall. The native children waited on the other children, and ate their meal last.

Taking the blame

Native children were also easy scapegoats. Edna recalls being blamed for the writing scrawled in the bathroom stall and the public beating that followed. The other girls were lined up against the walls to watch, giggling as a nun ordered Edna to lift up her dress and pull her panties down.

"I just see me trying to grab onto something, trying not to cry, not to yell. I went to sleep that night, hurtin' so bad. And another night, I remember waking up - the girl's name was Mary - I heard the screaming, help me, help me, Edna."

Mary, a year or two younger than Edna, had arrived at the school with her scalp crawling with lice. Edna was ordered to clean Mary up, brushing her hair day after day with coal oil to kill the lice. "You didn't mind?", I asked. "No," said Edna. "Why? She's a human being."

Mary was taken away that night Edna heard her calling for her.

"No Mary. Where did Mary go? I don't know what they did to her, I never saw her again. I've often prayed for her."

As Edna talked, her grand-daughter listened, hearing these stories for the first time about the trauma that would eventually sever Edna's relationships with her own daughters. The pain in the room was palpable - a sensation I would encounter many times as native people told me their stories about life in residential school.

Hurt and anger

Like Freddy Taylor, who told me about the Six Nations school in Peterborough, where he was separated from his two sisters, his long hair was cut - a recurring theme - and he was exposed to the harsh reality of being a new boy.

"There were about 80 other kids in a playroom in the basement," Freddy recalls. "A couple of them fought me, beat me up. Because they wanted my breakfast, my toast. And if I told who beat me up, I got another beating from the boys' master. And I was scared because I couldn't speak English."

As a child, Freddy drew constantly - on scraps of paper, in the dirt with a twig, carving the bark of a tree with a knife - driven by a creative spirit that refused to die in spite of the abuse.

There were the repeated beatings, yes, but far worse was the sexual abuse at the hands of the 'masters'. Freddy said it could happen at any time, and the boys were rewarded with extra food.

"I'm 63 now," Freddy told me, "and I still cry sometimes late at night, because of hurt and anger."

The Indian agent

Freddy's cousin, Zelda Kinsella, narrowly escaped residential school. She told of Mr. Adams, the 'Indian agent' and his secretary, who arrived at her home when her parents were away to take Zelda to a residential school. Zelda talked about the strange fate that kept their paths intertwined, and discovering the secretary's dark secret - a baby born out of wedlock, a disgrace in the early 1960s.

Looking back, Zelda feels something closer to compassion than bitterness for a young woman who, unlike Zelda, remained trapped by the conventions and attitudes of those times, and forced to give up her own child.

Bending the rules

Dorothy Cameron was kidnapped from her home in northern Ontario in a bush plane, and flown to a residential school in Kenora, Ontario. Dorothy still bears the physical damage from the beatings she suffered at the school. But often it wasn't the cruelty in these stories that moved me most. It was the memory of kindnesses, perhaps because they threw the abuse in such sharp relief.

I'll never forget Dorothy's story about the teacher who quietly bent the rules when Dorothy was in her teens, to allow a traumatized native girl to skip her high school class and spend time teaching smaller children to read.

"I still have a school picture," Dorothy says of herself at 14, "standing with Grade One and Twos, and at the end of the line is a principal. I still carry that with me."

Today, Dorothy teaches Ojibway to other native adults who have forgotten their own mother tongue.

The brightness of children

Stories about compassion stir us in a way that stories of cruelty do not. Like Cindy Blackstock's story of Dr. P.H. Bryce, a figure from the turn of the century, who as Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health, was asked by the federal government to survey the health of children at residential schools across the country.

Cindy is head of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, an umbrella association for groups that teach parenting skills to residential school survivors, skills they never witnessed as children.

Cindy told me about studying Bryce's papers, and discovering this white doctor, born in Toronto, who was so horrified by what he saw in the residential school system that he spent the rest of his career pleading with the government to shut down the schools.

On the morning when Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood up in the House of Commons to apologize to Canada's aboriginal people for decades of abuse in residential schools, Cindy Blackstock visited Dr. Bryce's grave near her home in Ottawa to lay down a brightly coloured bouquet of gerbera daisies.

Why gerbera daisies, I asked? Because, Cindy said, they reminded her of the brightness of children.

(Photos contributed, stock or by Mary Wiens /CBC)